Blazing trails

Thank Scott Semans and Bill Longwell for your next walk in the
woods

Hikers stepping past one of Bill Longwell's or Scott Semans's
trail-maintenance crews in the Issaquah Alps seem a little unsure
of what to offer as a greeting. "Sure looks like work" would
certainly be true, but inane. "Have a nice day" might not be
applicable, especially if it's raining and the crew is lathered in
mud. What Longwell and Semans crave to hear, of course, is, "Where
do I sign up?" They don't hear it often enough.

"I have seven or eight people who volunteer over and over, and
they're almost all around 70," says Longwell, himself 68. "We enjoy
doing trail work. But nobody's coming along to replace us."

Longwell and Semans, who is 53, both volunteer for the Issaquah
Alps Trails Club; Semans is the club's volunteer coordinator. "It's
not hard to get people to volunteer," he says. "A lot of hikers
feel a sense of obligation. What's hard is to get them to come back
and do it again. I think they feel their obligation is discharged.
And yeah, it's hard work."

It would be much harder work for hikers to bushwhack through the
mountains east of Seattle if not for these guys. Longwell, a
retired English teacher who just passed the 46,000-mile mark in
lifetime hiking, laid out the Issaquahs' fetching 16-mile Tiger
Mountain Trail and began building it in 1977. Semans, who makes his
living with an Internet business dealing in rare Asian coins,
stumbled into trail building in 1997. He discovered a remnant of a
long-abandoned county trail on Cougar Mountain and decided, without
exactly asking permission, to restore it so he could enjoy solitary
strolls in the woods.

The art of trail design

Both men are now experts on the nuances of trail design and
maintenance. They love to discuss such arcana as which kind of logs
to use for curbs that reinforce a trail's downhill edge (Douglas
fir or hemlock, which resist rot better than hardwoods). They can
look at a slight depression in a trail segment, anticipate trouble,
and engineer a drainage channel on the spot. Their styles are
different, however. Leading maintenance parties, Longwell likes to
move fast and clear maximum mileage. Semans is a detail freak who
will fill and grade a single curve for an hour, then return alone
after his crew has departed to massage it into perfect form.

In defense of such occasional extremism, trail design and care
is surprisingly complicated and is becoming more so. Nature nags
western Washington trails with relentless rain and encroaching
greenery, such as salal and sword ferns, and periodically unleashes
a wind or ice storm (as it did December 4) that topples thousands
of trees onto the paths. Metro Seattle's burgeoning population
spills an army of hikers onto the nearby trails every week, and the
newer crazes of mountain biking and trail running erode paths
faster than hiking ever did.

On a winter-morning hike on Tiger Mountain, Semans stops to
frown at a kink in a trail, navigating around a recently fallen
fir. If he had been packing a saw, he would have attacked the log
on the spot and restored the original route.

"I'm very conservative," he explains. "I'd keep the trail where
it was. Partly out of a sense of history, but also partly because
you don't know what could go wrong with a new route. People will
naturally take the easiest route, but the problem is that water
always seeks out the path of least resistance too."

That path of least resistance is what worries Longwell and
Semans when it comes to people enjoying these trails. They would
love to see more volunteers join their work parties or even see
hikers pocket a folding limb saw and engage in a little freelance
maintenance while exploring the trails. "There are a lot of lone
wolves working out there," Longwell says. "Sometimes they contact
us and we adopt them. It sort of gets in your blood."

How to pitch inBill Longwell and Scott Semans lead volunteers for the
Issaquah Alps Trails Club, but every mountain, forest, city park,
and public beach needs help these days. Here are a few groups to
contact if you want to lend a hand.